Pioneering 1:1 iPads Meets Resistance?

Day 1- students enter class, routinely engage with vocabulary, followed by a 10 minute lecture, and textbook readings all without electronic devices. We examine an essay question on model rationales for legitimacy of leadership throughout history and analyze documents. Instead,  I offered learning as a moveable feat. Students went on a scavenger hunt to find quotes hung on walls throughout the building. Elizabeth the Great hung in the library, Machiavelli near the principal's office, Mao Zedong, near security. Students with devices could opt to take a picture and return to class. Students without could read them, and return to class to receive their paper handout. Students with iPads gleefully ran around taking pictures and returned to sit with peers who were already reading the paper copies. Both types of students were able to enjoy the content in the classroom without penalty. Equity was maintained even though Ipads allowed for instant highlighting and note-taking to email to partners upon request.

 Do not rely on the wow factor of apps or iPads.  I  know how to split my typing screen and zoom between apps with a 5 finger swipe, because my tutor is my 8 year old daughter. Most students are  digital natives, knowing more about technology than I will so I can not make the mistake of insisting that they use technology  for a particular lesson.  The need for control ruined projects for my pioneering colleagues and it has made me consider the skills  students  need to develop instead. It is two days before midterms and study skills need honing.  I began the routine vocabulary lesson with their words printed on sticky notes, one set per group. Students groups were mixed between paper friendly  and iPads. Each group leader introduced a word aloud while individuals attempted to illustrate the definition on a sketching app or a piece of paper. I demonstrated this on Notability with stick figure drawings. Students shared their illustrations and divergent interpretations with a focus on fun yet  informative, corrective study.  I  posted all the vocabulary from the semester onto our Haiku platform page for student access. Students had the advantage of connecting to this immediately or still accessing paper copies in their classroom folders. We developed several versions of illustrative activities before moving onto other study strategies.

Choice is powerful. My colleagues were well  intentioned when they assigned mandatory applications to a project based learning project. Had I pioneered I would have done the same thing.  The educators were not experts but insisted students presentation rely solely on Explain Everything,  a fantastic mashup for video, and notetaking. Problems arose and the problem solving took too long, students refused to complete the work, Luddites boasted that they knew this would fail and everyone looked foolish.  I decided to focus not on the application but on the skill and the content that applications could provide. Starting  with the Common Core:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.7 I intended to assess students on their ability to integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media by analyzing news sources. I ended my second day of classes by introducing students to a stack of newspaper sources we used to use and then to the benefits of an aggregator. I have been playing with Paper.li, Feedly, and Flipboard. Each app has a different aesthetic and pathway  to the access of news.  Ie-  a magazine, pinboard or a frontpage feature appeal to different learners. Students choose which aggregator they would use with only one requirement, to include 2 suggested sources (BBC and Al Jazeera). Right away the benefits of having all news in a mobile device, instead of reading stacks of paper seems sensible. I will still keep one paper subscription and the Sunday New York Times on hand.

Routines are everything. Every day class ends with a formative assessment.  Sometimes I put a poll or tally on a wall opposite the doorway, delivering this task when students cue restlessness. I plan to continue this practice alternating between paper activities and applications.  For yesterday's lesson I linked slaveryfootprint.org to a QR code and pinned that to a wall.  Students scanned the code which brought them to the interactive lesson in current sweatshop labor practices worldwide. The site challenges the notion that consumption has a human price tag.  Curiosity drew all to gather around a few iPads, conversing as survey choices were made. I kept an Upfront magazine article highlighting similar statistics handy but reactions to the interactive  kept attention undivided. By the day's end my last junior hold out signed out her iPad. I stayed   nonchalant assuring that paper resources will continue to be a classroom resource.

Keep transforming. Sticking to classroom management systems and routines really do not have to change.  What will change is the amount of control educators are used to. I am slow to transform so I rely on reading Twitter feeds from my favorite innovators, retweet eye-catching notions . Later, I revisit  these on my homepage and read carefully. Vicky Davis reposted an article which addressed the very stage I am at.